Emo gains ground among mainstream audiences

  Thick black glasses, girl’s belts, tight shirts, flamboyant hair; this is how Mark Gallegovs, guitar teacher at Guitar Town in Milledgeville, describes emo, the latest trend in music and fashion among young people. 
    “It’s simply the product of an angry generation whose parents made them eat spinach,” Gallegovs said.
    Chances are good you may have seen someone who fits this description, most likely smoking cigarettes outside your neighborhood coffee shop. 
    Although it may sound funny, “emo” is quickly becoming one of the most popular forms of music due to Internet message boards such as MySpace, Facebook and Xanga. Of the 66 different genres of music listed on MySpace.com, emo and hardcore combine to form the fourth largest fan base behind rock, hip-hop and rap.  Pop music and the American Idols seem to have fizzled down to number 12 on the list, perhaps marking a significant change in people’s musical taste buds.
    So what exactly is emo and where did it come from? Well, according to Andy Radin, author of emo enthusiast website fourfa.com, the term is a broad title covering many similar styles of emotionally charged punk rock that began in Washington D.C. in the early 1980s.
    Furthermore, the term is short for emotional, and the music is often characterized by screaming and/or crying, sometimes even uninhibited sobbing.  There are several variations of emo including hardcore, emo-core and screamo.  These genres often overlap and are virtually indistinguishable to the untrained emo ear.
    After listening to several emo songs from a variety of bands and reading the incoherent lyrics in print, one is left with several unanswered questions. 
    “I wonder if they even know how to play,” said Dr. Douglas O’Grady, assistant professor of musical composition and theory at GCSU.  “Unfortunately, our media controls our culture, which in turn reflects the short attention span of today’s listeners.”
    In all fairness to emo-rockers, it is necessary to point out that punk rock has never been focused around musical virtuosity, but instead around the message contained in the lyrics.  Emo lyrics tend to dwell around mostly harmless subjects, but some of the more popular bands, such as Saves the Day, My Chemical Romance and Dashboard Confessional, seem to focus primarily around elements of sadness such as depression, angst, self-mutilation, drug use and suicide. Many – if not the majority – of the fan postings on Xanga focus on these elements as well.
    “I think it’s done mostly for shock value to freak out people over 30,” said Mary Jane Phillips, director of counseling services at GCSU.  “However, I’d be really concerned if this was indeed their state of mind.”
    Phillips said she has seen a recent increase in anti-social behaviors among teens such as “cutting,” a form of self-mutilation, but urges parents not to prevent their kids from listening to this music in order to avoid the “forbidden fruit” appeal.  Instead, parents should find out from their children what is appealing to them about the music.          “As long as the child can maintain good grades, have friends and be active in sports and extracurricular activities, I don’t think there is anything to worry about,” Phillips said.  “People in the 1920s thought the Charleston was shocking.”

Posted by Colonnade Archives on Sep 29 2006. Filed under Features. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0. You can leave a response or trackback to this entry